Artists in the Oceanside exhibit have different styles yet share a certain sensibility &#8211; and a flair for the fantastical

Fine art and popular culture have had an on-again/off-again romance for a
long time now. Just how long depends on what you think of as popular
culture.

You can easily date the relationship to the 19th century and to the rise of political cartoons and caricatures, as well as dime novels and early comics. So, lowbrow art has been around. The caustic French artist Honore Daumier was a proto-lowbrow, so was Mexico's Jose Guadalupe Posada – both are true and enduring originals.

But there are good times and bad for art that snubs its nose at current academic standards. Times have been good for the lowbrows among us for a while now.

It's been that way for nearly five decades running, ever since the early 1960s, with the rise of pop art – which used comics and industrial design in a sort of highbrow way – and the stirrings of surf art that emerged at about the same time and then morphed into psychedelic work.

This is the backdrop to the rise of what is called lowbrow art or pop surrealism in the 1970s. Juxtapoz magazine, as much as any gallery, has been its showcase since 1994. Robert Williams is the éminence grise of the publication and lowbrow art.

The exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art uses both terms in its title: “Lowbrow Art: Nine San Diego Pop Surrealists.” Lowbrow is the term that has stuck, as the show's guest curators, Jerry Waddle (of Ducky Waddles Emporium/Gallery) and artist Michael C. Gross point out.

This is odd, since the highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow idea of culture is old now. It became standard cultural lingo in the 1950s.

The change is from seeing it as a positive instead of a negative. Poster art is event-driven, and Scrojo's images are posters in the show – made to advertise the appearance of music acts (Morrissey and Pinback, among others) or an event (a cook-off).

You can see why Waddle and Gross picked this artist. His designs take a page out of both the psychedelic and pop handbooks, with a few footnotes from Shepard Fairey and Daniel Clowes, then he fuses them and comes up with something different – and distinctive.

There's a sound sense of how to be simple, as in a Belly Up Tavern poster for the San Francisco band American Music Club. A girl's face fills the picture; she wears other faces and text on her shoulder and arm like tattoos. Scrojo also did a deft new poster for the exhibition, a jaunty picture of a woman with the name of the show on banners and the artists “tattooed” on her body.

Though Scrojo is the only poster artist on view – Craig Haskett is his legal name – his work underscores the democratic dimension of lowbrow art. It has precedents in everything from the comics of R. Crumb to the hot-rod art of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and Von Dutch to posters going back to late 19th-century Paris and the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec. But as it has evolved into a movement revolving around paintings and prints, the sources have widened to include folk art, modernist styles (surrealism among them) and even old masters.